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Modigliani said to me time and again that he wanted a short but intense life. Jacques Lipchitz, 1954 AMEDEO MODIGLIANI (1884-1920) got his wish. He died of tuberculosis, aged 35, in Paris. But his health was shattered by drink and drugs. Yet in that ‘short but intense life’ he created sculptures and figurative paintings of classical beauty. His life was almost a caricature of the bohemian artist in novels and opera: consumptive, subversive, poetic (‘I never met a painter who Read More

Édouard Manet saw the paintings by Velázquez in the Prado and was awed. ‘He is the painter of painters,’ he wrote, ‘he has astonished me, he has ravished me.’ You can feel what Manet felt if you go to Rome’s Palazzo Doria Pamphilj. In a small room are two masterpieces, both created around 1650: one a sculpted bust by Bernini; the other a painting by Velázquez (while on his second visit to Rome). They are of Pope Innocent X. Their Read More

RAPHAEL (1483-1520), so his biographer Vasari tells us, died aged only 37 of too much sex. This unlikely scenario does however tell us something about the man. He was passionate. He was beguiling. The coquettish woman in La Fornarina (his mistress?) holds a bare breast while pointing at an armband bearing his name, as if she belonged to Raphael. Her sidelong eyes seem to share a joke.  Unlike his tormented rivals, Michelangelo and Leonardo, he had no repressed or unrepressed Read More

MICHELANGELO was 17 when a fellow student (‘a bestial and arrogant man’) punched him on the nose and broke it. It was a permanent disfigurement that this celebrant of male beauty felt keenly. Anger burned throughout his life. One papal patron, Leo X, dithered over commissioning the great artist: ‘But he is terribile; one cannot deal with him.’ Yet it was his terribilità, his ability to instil awe, terror or a sense of the sublime, that led contemporaries to call Read More

MICHELANGELO MERISI DA CARAVAGGIO (1571–1610) was a violent yob but a painter of genius. He did not invent chiaroscuro, dramatic contrasts of light, but he took it to expressive heights, darkening the shadows, transfixing a subject in a blinding beam. The dramatic tenebrism he perfected changed art. It pervades the Baroque and 19th century realism – and film noir. But the Baroque took Caravaggio’s theatricality without the psychological insight. He worked without preparatory sketches. His models were beggars, whores, riff-raff. Read More

HENRI ROUSSEAU (1844-1910) was born in Laval, Mayenne, into the family of a tinsmith (who went broke and had his house seized). After high school, where Henri excelled at drawing, he studied law but was caught cheating his employer, a solicitor, out of some petty cash and stamps and sent to jail for a month (1864). When released he joined the army. In 1871 he got a job as a customs official in Paris. Thus his nickname of ‘Le Douanier’. Read More

HOLLYWOOD, according to Orson Welles, was ‘the biggest electric train any boy ever had.’ It was a Mecca for the gifted, and ungifted. Herman Mankiewicz, co-author with Welles of Citizen Kane (1941), telegrammed screenwriter Ben Hecht – ‘Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don’t let this get around.’ The cinema’s ‘Golden Age’ is 1927 (when sound started withAl Jolson’s The Jazz Singer) to 1960. 1960 marked key moments in screen history. The studios Read More

HENRI MATISSE (1869-1954) ‘In Matisse we see the decorative, in Picasso the destructive.’ It’s a traditional view, but a distortion. They were both figurative, both abstract. Both celebrated colour and line. They changed our sense of beauty; and they changed art forever. Matisse began the revolution, around 1904, with the ‘brutal’ colour of his ‘Fauve’ period (‘wild beast’). ‘Colours became sticks of dynamite,’ said André Derain, his fellow Fauve; but Matisse was less bombastic. He was finding out ‘how to Read More

‘Paris is the World, the rest of the Earth is nothing but its suburbs.’  So said the playwright Marivaux in 1734. Paris was then at its zenith, the largest city in Europe and unmatched for luxury and style. During the 11C, Paris had grown rich from the silver trade; and it lay on a strategic route for pilgrims and merchants. In medieval times relics drew hordes of pious tourists with disposable cash. King Louis IX (later Saint Louis) built Sainte-Chapelle Read More